Dirt Cheap Oracle steps #3 & #4 of 6: Install Oracle XE and Apex 3.0

Ok kids, play time is over, it’s time to install Oracle, upgrade Apex and then turn out the lights for a good night’s sleep. After double-checking that they haven’t released 11g XE yet :(, I download Oracle XE 10gR2, as well as Apex 3.0 for good measure (no Apex 4.0 yet either…).

Did some reading, and learned a lot about configuring Linux, but in the end it was a frightfully simple matter to install the RPM using the RPM[Wikipedia:RPM] command (who would have guessed), it installed without a hitch and told me to run the configure command, which I did, and that went fine as well. So now I’ve got Oracle running.

Apex as installed along with Oracle XE works a bit differently to what I’m used to (I’m running 3.0 on Oracle 10GR2 Enterprise Edition on my WinXP box for experimental purposes), it serves as the administration GUI to the database (no Enterprise Manager, unfortunately) as well as the application development environment. The database (Oracle XE), being free, is limited to 4GB of user data, and will only use 1GB of RAM (which is fine, that’s all I’m giving it anyway). To help ensure I don’t go over 4GB I’ll keep my large media files on the file system instead of in the database, and I’ll design my applications with automated cleanup routines for tables that grow a lot. So far my applications on my experimental 10G database only use 1GB, and that’s including a whole lot of BLOBs, so I don’t think I’ll have a problem with this limit if I’m careful.

Next step is to upgrade to Apex 3.0 which means I lose the cute Apex database administration interface, but I have to do this because the apps I want to migrate are currently on 3.0. Not to worry, there’s a good guide for administrating Oracle XE and Apex 3.0.1 here. After upgrading I disable the SYSTEM login for Apex, and use the ADMIN account like I’m accustomed to.